I had a customer call me last week with a potentially disastrous situation. It seems his 175 pound Rottweiler wanted to assist him with his flower garden watering and grabbed the end of the hose and ran toward him, snapping the hose bib at the stucco line, filling both his yard and his neighbors with water before he was able to turn the water off. He was then faced with the task off soldering a piece of pipe on the kinked and jagged end of pipe inside the stucco line. 99% of people would sum up this situation and call a plumber to rectify this. Not this customer. He decides he is going to go to Home Depot and purchase everything he needs to solder copper pipe and fix this himself.
I guess Home Depot sells a video with its soldering paraphernalia. I know what you’re thinking. They sell repair couplings that can be pushed on copper and plastic pipe to make water tight connections now. True, but the end of the pipe must be nicely round to use them, remember this pipe is kinked. We use a suageing tool, used to hammer into the pipe to expand the end of the pipe and make a coupling out of it or to make the end round to put a fitting on. Most younger plumbers would not know how to do this because most residential water systems are plastic pipe now. When I was doing commercial work several times my foreman would come find me and have me make these repairs because the younger journeymen could not. This is not to say that I am so great, though I truly am, but when I learned the trade it was all copper pipe everywhere, and you had to make these repairs sometimes.
But, I digress.
To make a long story short, this customer spent $50 dollars on soldering stuff he may never use again, almost burning his house down in the process. He said it took him three hours to get the end of the pipe round enough to get a coupling on, cleaned the pipe end, applied flux, heated the pipe, applied the solder but every time he thought he had it, it would leak. He did this three times. I had to admire his persistence. He did not know that there is a very small window of time that if the flux is overheated it will burn and the solder will not take. He also found out that they use tar paper under the stucco, or used to, and this stuff is like gasoline when flame hits it. I soak the area with water before I solder.
He called me and I made the repair and he got his water back on.
What did this customer save and how many months did he shorten his life expectancy, putting himself through the stress of this ordeal?
One can only guess.
